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Re: New Web Design

Excellent site Solar. Top class. I like the layout, colours and design.

My first instinct was to click the ‘home’ key, which didn’t work. I thought I was on the ‘gallery’ page. I realize now the gallery page is the home page. If so, I would either remove the big ‘home’ button on the home page, or the word ‘gallery’. My own choice would be to put an actual homepage up, that would explain who you are and what you do. It would have a link to the gallery, which would take you to what is currently your homepage. At the moment there is nothing said about what you do or who you are. Much of your traffic will be from people who know nothing about you or your business, so you need to make this clear.

The gallery itself contains many excellent designs, but once activated it is fairly slow going. These are mostly single images so I would normally expect them to load instantly. It goes through at a decent speed the second time around, but how many people watch such things twice? Also, if you are in the slideshow, what do you click to go back to the slideshow menu (thumbnails)?

Perhaps the gallery’s set of small thumbnails could be presented lower on the page, and as the viewer places their cursor over them a larger image could appear in the main frame above. People could see the design instantly and keep browsing this way instead of waiting out the slow loading slideshow. Perhaps you could have a button called ‘slideshow’ for those who prefer slideshows, but it would need to load faster and have an option to return to the menu from any page.

Re: New Web Design

Thank you James for the input.

You're right, upon going to the site, it does look like you're on the "gallery" page. I will focus on changing that. I will also address the loading issue of the gallery.
Hovering the mouse over the slideshow brings up the nav bar, then you click the block symbol to view menu, but I see where you're going. Need to simply a bit.

Were you able to scroll down and view the whole home page? Information about me and other things were in the "info center". I ask about the scrolling due to a lockup with IE. On my computer using IE, I cannot scroll down. On every other computer I own it works fine with IE. I need to know if this is an isolated issue or a potential problem for all IE users.

Re: New Web Design

Itís amazing Solar Ė I can indeed scroll down, and what I saw makes the page far more complete. When I first opened the site I didnít even think to scroll down. Looking at it again I can see why this happened. Hopefully Iím only a one in ten person regarding this Ė and maybe nine out of ten will scroll down, but I will explain why I think it happened anyway.

Pages that are tailor made to fit a screen often have their ingredients neatly laid out in a box formation, and along the bottom there will often be some Ďfinalí elements, like contact details, email address, etc.

My screen is 1680 x 1050 and I use IE 9 beta. When looking at your page (without scrolling) I see a light grey rectangle at the bottom of the screen (below the yellow), going all the way across. It has three contact buttons (twitter, facebook and livechat) arranged neatly at the bottom of the screen. Since there are no other visual elements that look as though they continue down, I just assumed it was a complete page. The side bar (which the scroll button sits on) is a similar colour to the light grey rectangle, so it looks like it (the side bar) is a continuation of that bottom rectangle Ė framing the yellow around. This is probably why I didnít notice the scroll bar.

You could make the scroll bar stand out more by darkening the light grey rectangle. Another thing might work Ė if you had some writing or an image on the left or right that continued down, so that it was obvious the page continued downward. You could relocate those three buttons to the bottom of the page, so they donít give the impression the page is complete halfway up.

Re: New Web Design

I'm very much in agreement with James Allen. I scrolled down only part way then it looked like I was at the bottom of the page so I stopped there. Really beautiful designs Solar, I hope we see more from you.

Larry a.k.a wizard509

Never give up. You will never fail, you'll just find a whole lot of ways that don't work.